[TC11 Newsletter/Nov-2002]
Date: 12/06/2002 07:55 PM
Dear colleagues,
many of you will be working on your paper for
ICDAR 2003: good luck!
Note: deadline extension message:
>> In response to many requests, we are pleased to announce an
>> extension of the deadline for paper submission to ICDAR2003
>> to Midnight, Sunday January 5th 2003 PST, 8am Monday
>> January 6th 2003 GMT. This will be the final deadline and
>> there will be no further extensions, otherwise the review
>> process will not be able to proceed in good time.
>> Andy Downton, Conference Chair
>> Mike Fairhurst, Conference Co-Chair
>> Apostolos Antonacopoulos, Publications Chair
Furthermore, I have three exciting news items for you:
* 1. As discussed at the previous ICPR, continuity and
modernization are important aspects of governance
within the IAPR Technical Committees at large, including
TC-11. A solution has been found by the installment of
the function of Vice Chair, who will assist the current
TC-11 chair and who will be able to get accustomed with
the tasks involved. I am now very happy to announce a
new Vice Chair for TC-11: Ms. Jianying Hu, who presented
a convincing pamphlet for the directions of research in
TC-11 [see attachment]. Already, I would like to thank
Ms. Hu for taking up this responsibility.
From our new leader:
> It is my pleasure to re-appoint you officially
> as chairman of IAPR TC11 on Reading Systems.
> Based on your recommendation I would like to appoint also
> Jianying Hu as vice chair for TC-11.
> IAPR expects technical committees to promote research activities
> in their respective fields of specialization. Usually this is done by
> organizing workshops and meetings. Another activity is to create and
> maintain a web-page and a membership list to enhance its visibility
> and attract further members through the web. Please continue your
> good activities for TC11 in the above sense.
> Walter Kropatsch,
> IAPR 1st vice president
* 2. Ms. Katrin Franke was so nice to provide her report
on the IWFHR in Niagara on the Lake, this year.
Handwriting research is alive and kicking, so it seems!
[see attachment]
* 3. There is more movement ahead, in the area of camera-based
text and document recognition! The International Journal
on Document Analysis and Recognition is issuing a call
for papers on this topic [see PDF attachment].
Finally, if there are news items, don't hesitate to forward
them to me, I will be happy to collect and broadcast them.
Best regards,
Lambert Schomaker
Grote Kruisstraat 2/1, 9712 TS Groningen, The Netherlands
Tel: +31-50-363-7908 / Fax: +31-50-363-6687
TC11 Vice Chair Plans
Jianying Hu
While the traditional focus of the field of document
image analysis (DIA) started out with the analysis and
conversion of paper documents, it is clear that the
meaning of "document" has been expanding dramatically
over the last ten years. Being able to adapt to new ways
documents are being created and consumed in an ever
more technical savvy society is crucial to maintaining
the relevance and vigor of this field. I believe TC11
could and should play a major role in promoting research
in and attracting young researchers to the new research
areas vital to the growth of this community. To name a few:
1. Web Document Analysis (WDA). With the ever-increasing
use of the Web, a growing number of documents are published
and accessed on-line. Although the development of XML
and the new efforts on semantic web aim to improve
the machine-readability of web documents, it is not
going to eliminate the need for content analysis,
especially for the kind of web documents created as web
publications (vs. services) where visual appearance
is critical. Such content analysis is crucial
for many application including information extraction,
mining, summarization and content re-purposing for mobile
access, and this is where DIA can play a unique role.
There has been growing attention to WDA within the DIA
community, especially following the first WDA workshop
held in conjunction with ICDAR'01. Many interesting areas
have emerged besides content analysis mentioned above,
including utilizing and mining multilingual documents, web
page classification, and human interactive proofs (HIP).
TC11 could help nurturing this new field through active
support and promotion of the WDA workshop series, reaching
out to and engaging researchers in IR and WWW communities
(e.g., in the form of tutorials, invited speeches, etc.),
and improving our own visibility in those communities.
2. Electronic ink/Mobile user interfaces/annotation.
The success of the latest IWFHR indicates that interest
in handwriting recognition is still quite high. One
important new drive for electronic ink processing is
the increasing capacity and popularity of hand held
computers of all forms. Issues in pen based interface
design is attracting renewed attention, especially in
the context of multi-modal user interfaces for mobile
devices, and collaboration and document annotation
using such devices. InkXML is in the works and TC11
can play an active role to publicize this effort and
the related new research activities.
4. Vintage documents/Digital Library. Another area that
has attracted increasing attention from this field lately is
the analysis of vintage documents, related to the Digital
Library effort. This offers unique opportunities as well as
challenges for DIA, but has not been well explored so far by
this community. Again, TC11 could help by bringing more
awareness to this area through the official website.
September 2002
The historic town Niagara-on-the-Lake, at the mouth of the Niagara River,
was hosting the 8th International Workshop on Frontiers in Handwriting
Recognition from 6th ?8th August 2002.
The main objective of this workshop is to stimulate contacts between
researchers and practitioners, and to motivate in-depth discussions on
research results and frontiers in the field of handwriting recognition and
analysis. Even after more than thirty years of research in handwriting
recognition, with systems operating in actual practice, and products
being available on the consumer market, many scientific challenges will
remain to be solved. This year's workshop sessions were focused on
learning methods, classifier design, multiple classifiers, on-line/
off-line handwriting recognition, word recognition, pen computing, document
applications, postal applications, signature verification and writer
identification as well as forensic document examination.
Since 1990 the workshop is being organized as satellite event to the
International Conference on Pattern Recognition (ICPR), which was hosted in
Que'bec City, Canada, this year. Remembering the discussions for a suitable
IWFHR-workshop location four years ago, there were strong arguments for
Niagara-on-the-Lake with its natural beauty and tourist's attractions.
Moreover, the region offers a deep insight into the culture and history of
North America. Niagara-on-the-Lake is being always a place where Canadians
and US citizens meet. So, it seems to be also symbolic that the workshop was
co-chaired by S.-N. Srihari from Center of Excellence for Document Analysis
and Recognition (CEDAR), State University of New York at Buffalo, United
States, and M. Cheriet from E'cole de Technologie Supe'rieure, Canada.
Of course, not only the magnificent workshop location but also the excellent
scientific program attracted an international audience. All together 144
university members as well as representatives of governmental organizations
and industrial entities coming from 21 countries attended the workshop.
During three memorable days participants followed 51 oral presentations and
three panels. In the course of three poster sessions with 36 presentations
the possibilities for individual discussions with the poster presenters was
given. Among the papers that were accepted for presentations, the
international program committee selected the two best papers on the basis of
a fair evaluation process. In the category senior research G. Seni from
Motorola Inc. was honored for his outstanding research and presentation
titled 'TreadMill Ink ? Enabling Continuous pen Input on Small Devices'.
Best paper in the category junior researcher was devoted to C. Bahlmann from
the University of Freiburg, Germany, for his work and presentation on
'On-line Handwriting recognition with Support Vector machines ? A kernel
approach.'
IWFHR-workshops are always a platform to recover challenging research
topics. This year, the panels sessions, in particular panels on pen
computing and forensic document examination, pointed to new directions and
drawn a future of applications employing handwriting recognition and
analysis.
In the course of the pen-computing panel, presenters agreed that the time
for a broad usage of pens for computer-interaction has come. First consumer
products, such as mobile phones, handheld and mobile computers are on the
market. Moreover, next generation of pen computers is already prototypically
realized. However, there is still the great demand in the standardization of
pen-input data. So, it was an excellent opportunity to present the brand-new
InkXML-specification in the evening of the first workshop day.
InkXML is promoted by researchers and practitioners from IBM Corp., Intel
Corp., Motorola Inc. and the International Unipen Foundation (iUF).
So far, the InkXML draft was officially contributed to the W3C - Multimodal
Interaction working group, and has recently been posted in the public
archives.
During the panel on forensic document examination practitioners from
forensics, in particular from US Secret Service, Federal Investigation
Bureau (FBI), Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS)} as well as from
Canada Custom stated their expectations from research in the field of
handwriting recognition and analysis. Areas of interest are identification
of writers based on static samples of handwriting, relations from
psycho-motor handwriting production to the visual appearances of
handwriting as well as recovering of language and writing system specific
patterns in handwritten products. T. Moran, from US Secret Service, gave
impressive presentation on state-of-the-art technologies in computer-based
forensic handwriting analysis as used in forensic labs. However, the
dramatic increase of white-collar crime derives a great demand of high
sophisticated approaches to computer-based forensic handwriting examination.
The soaring interest and the expected benefit form research in the field of
handwriting recognition and analysis is also reflected by the number and
superiority of workshop sponsors that are (in alphabetical order) A2ia
Corp, Hitachi Ltd., International Association of Pattern Recognition (IAPR),
Microsoft Corporation, Motorola Inc., Siemens AG and United States
Postal Service. Nevertheless, their support and the marvelous enthusiasm of
the many colleagues from Center of Excellence for Document Analysis and
Recognition (CEDAR) guaranteed a successful workshop.
On the last evening of the workshop, participants gathered in the
exquisitely designed Cha^teau des Charmes. After following a
guided walking tour through the harvest room and underground barrel cellars,
participants enjoyed the vine and the beautiful view over the vineyards.
Later that night, C. Suen, honorary chair of this year^(1)s workshop and
initiator of the IWFHR workshop series in 1990, raised his glass to praise
colleagues and friends who promoted IWFHR series so far. In recognition for
their distinguished contributions, the organizers of the past workshops were
honored with one of the last copies of the 1990-workshop-proceeding becoming
'antique' and in great demand in the meantime. The IWFHR-community also wants to
thank previous workshop organizers and their teams, being in 1991 S.
Impedovo and J.C. Simon, in 1993 S.-N. Srihari, 1994 J.-F. Wang, 1996 A.C.
Downtown and S. Impedovo, in 1998 J.-H. Kim, in 2000 L. Schomaker and in
2002 S.-N. Srihari and M. Cheriet.
The next IWFHR-workshop will be organized by H. Fujisawa, from Hitachi Ltd..
>From October, 26th-28th, 2004 we will meet in Kokubunji/Tokyo, Japan, for
the first time. We look forward to this next highlight and the world-famous
hospitality of the Japanese. Meanwhile we will stick to our research and
developments demanding our attention and creativity. However, keep in mind,
next deadline, 15th March 2004, is coming faster than expected.
For all those who wish to personally interchange with colleagues in 2003,
International Conference on Document Analysis and Recognition (ICDAR -
http://www.essex.ac.uk/ese/icdar2003/) provides an excellent platform as
well. The conference will be hosted in Edinburgh, Scotland from 23th -26th
August 2003.
I look forward to meet and discuss with you virtually over the Internet or
on a personal base during one of the next conferences.
Katrin Franke